Memorial Day is now primarily noted as the beginning of the summer season, but it began as a day to memorialize those who were killed in combat while serving their country, and also to recognize veterans for their service. It was first observed on May 30, 1868 to honor those who served and died in the Civil War.
My uncle Leo, my father’s brother who I never met, and who my younger brother Leo was named after, was killed in the South Pacific in 1942 while serving aboard the USS South Dakota, a battleship he helped build at the New York Ship yard in Camden.
My father, who was a Camden politceman, also enlisted shortly after Pearl Harbor and was assigned to the 8th US Army Air Force in England where he served as a waist gunner on a Boeing B-17 dubbed The Flying Fortress. They were the first Americans to see combat in the European theater.
While the British fllew their bombing missions at night, the Americans flew what they called precision daylight bombing raids hitting strategic targets throughout Nazi occupied Europe.
They set the number of missions that had to flown at 25, and while a plane named Hells Angels was the first to acomplish that, a few days later the Memphis Belle did the same thing on May 17, 1943, and became one of the most famous planes in American history. Movie director, William Wyler made a documentary film about the Belle and its crew and later, in 1990, a popular major motion picture would be made under the same name.
Other films about the 8th Air Force have also been made including Command Decision, starring Clark Gable, who was also a B-17 waist gunner in my father’s squadron, and Twelve O’Clock High, with Gregory Peck, that was the basis for a long running TV series as well.
One evening, while the family was watching the origional William Wyler documentary on the Memphis Belle, that features actual aerial combat scenes, one plane, all shot up, was seen landing. My mother screemed when she saw a medic assisting a wounded airman out of the plane. “Bill, that’s you!,” my mother said, and sure enough, it was him, assisted onto a stretcher and carried away.
I later found my father’s war journal and learned that it was his 19th mission, May 17, 1942, and it was only recorded on film because William Wyler was there to make the Memphis Belle documentary. More famous for directing such classic movies as Ben Hur, Roman Holliday and The Best Years of our Lives, the Memphis Belle documentary stands out for it’s realism. One of Wyler’s cameraman was killed when the plane he was on was shot down.
Dad’s plane was nicknamed Old Pus, and had a black cat holding a machine gun painted on its side. As a waist gunner my father fired a 50 caliber machine gun, with four inch shells that dropped at your feet. A roll of 50 caliber machine gun bullets ran nine yards, hence the saying – “The whole nine yards,” that people mistakenly thought was a football term.
They were primarily up against the German air force, the Luftwaffe and Focke-Wolf Fw 190 fighters that packed a machine gun and a 20 mm cannon. My father was shooting at a Focke-Wolf coming directly at him when he was wounded, hit in the hand, a finger being shot off, though the German flyer was probably hit, as my dad was credited with two confirmed kills.
When the fighter planes left, the flack guns from the ground started shooting as the planes were over their target, and flack burst inside the cabin sent shrapnel into his forehead, so he was wounded twice.
With William Wyler’s film crew rolling, Old Pus rolled to a stop and the medics entered the plane, assisting the wounded out to stretchers and ambulances. While dad was in England his mother, my grandmother died, so he couldn’t attend her funeral. It took him a few months to recouperate, and he was sent to a hotel -hospital in Atlantic City where my mother visited him.
After seeing Wyler’s documentary on TV, my father wrote to the TV production company in Hollywood and someone went to the trouble of finding the relevant scene and sent him three stills of color prints.
The Hollwood producers also said they had a TV show interviewing combat veterans and would fly him and his family to California to get his story on film, and while the family was excited to go, he declined. He just couldn’t talk about it.
My mother however, kept a scrapbook of news clipping that mention him, his plane or his squadron. One item stood out, descriping how, while returning to base, Old Pus left the formation and dropped a dud bomb through the roof of the French radio station where Axis Sally, real name Mildred Gillars. The bomb was enscribed with a song request – Marlene Dietrich’s Lilli Marleen.
So every Memorial Day weekend I know it’s the beginning of summer, but I can’t help thinking about my Uncle Leo, and my father, who almost didn’t make it.
